BACKGROUND Low health literacy is associated with higher health care utilization and costs; however, no large-scale studies have demonstrated this in the Veterans Health Administration (VHA). This research evaluated the association between veterans' health literacy and their subsequent VHA health care costs across a three-year period. METHODS This retrospective study used a Generalized Linear...

Markets facilitate the exchange of precise quantities of goods and services at particular locations and times; yet for convenience and to reduce transactions costs, these markets customarily specify the terms (e.g. the price) uniformly over a substantial interval of space and time. If customers’ tastes and producers’ costs vary continuously over these dimensions, then assessing uniform prices w...

The author is an economist with the Bureau of Economics, Federal Trade Commission. The views expressed in this study are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Commission or any individual Commissioner. iv EXECUTIVE SUMMARY This study assesses empirically the competitiveness of the long distance telephone market. To do so, it estimates firm-specific long-run demand ...

PURPOSE Total knee arthroplasty (TKA) is an effective, but also cost-intensive health care procedure for the elderly. Furthermore, bearing demographic changes in Western Europe in mind, TKA-associated financial investment for health care insurers will increase notably and thereby catalyze discussions on ressource allocation to Orthopedic surgery. To derive a quantitative rationale for such disc...

Many countries mandate affirmative action in university admissions for traditionally disadvantaged groups. Little is known about either the efficacy or costs of these programs. This paper examines affirmative action in engineering colleges in India for “lower-caste” groups. We find that it successfully targets the financially disadvantaged: the marginal upper-caste applicant comes from a more a...

We review the core issues in managerial accounting for radiologists. We introduce the topic and then explore its application to diagnostic imaging. We define key terms such as fixed cost, variable cost, marginal cost, and marginal revenue and discuss their role in understanding the operational and financial implications for a radiology facility by using a cost-volume-profit model. Our work plac...

This paper analyzes the relationships among investment, , and cash flow in a tractable stochastic model in which marginal  and average  are equal. Using a Markov regime switching process to generate the marginal operating profit of capital, the paper analyzes the impact of a mean-preserving spread on the unconditional distribution and a change in the persistence of the marginal operating pro...

This paper explains the nonneutrality of money from two assumptions: (1) consumers dislike paying prices that exceed some fair markup on firms’ marginal costs; and (2) consumers underinfer marginal costs from available information. After an increase in money supply, consumers underappreciate the increase in nominal marginal costs and hence partially misattribute higher prices to higher markups;...

AIMS To demonstrate an application of health economic principles in histopathology by using the sampling of transurethral resections of prostate specimens. By demonstrating how marginal costs are calculated the aim is to illustrate that the potential opportunity cost of sampling entire specimens is much greater than would be anticipated by taking average cost, or the cost of producing a histolo...

Aims—To demonstrate an application of health economic principles in histopathology by using the sampling of transurethral resections of prostate specimens. By demonstrating how marginal costs are calculated the aim is to illustrate that the potential opportunity cost of sampling entire specimens is much greater than would be anticipated by taking average cost, or the cost of producing a histolo...